‘Blockade’ on Liberation War screened in The Hague

City Desk
Only a week before the month of Victory, the Embassy of Bangladesh in The Hague of Netherlands has organised screening of a Liberation War documentary film titled ‘Blockade’. The event was held on November 25.
New Jersey-based Bangladeshi IT expert Arif Yousuf directed and produced the documentary. The documentary is the winner of 2017 The World’s Indepen­dent Film Festival (TWIFF) award, San Francisco, Cali­fornia in the category of documentary.
The film comprises stories of the Philadelphia resident peace activists Richard K. Taylor, Phyllis Taylor, Sally Willoughby; UPenn Professors Dr. Klaus Krippendorff, Dr. Charles Khan and Bengali expatriates then living in Philadelphia area Dr. Sultana Alam, Dr. Monayem Chowdhury and Mozharul Hoque.
After screening the 85-minute documentary, Arif Yousuf was connected with the audience via Skype.
He shared his experiences of making the documentary and mentioned that it took more than eight years to make the film.
Ambassador of Bangladesh in the Netherlands Sheikh Mohammed Belal congratulated the director for his successful making of the documentary. On the eve of the month of victory, he paid tribute to the Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, martyrs and freedom fighters of 1971.
The documentary is based on story of nonviolent protest to stop the shipment of arms from the US to Pakistan during the Bangladesh War of Liberation in 1971.
Drawing upon rare archival images of the protests and direct iterviews with key activists, Blockade offers a powerful reminder of the lengths that ordinary people around the world went to in order to stop the genocide in Bangladesh.
Encouraged by Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s historic 7th March speech, when people of Bangladesh orchestrated their protests, the Western media gradually came to know of the horror unleash by the Pakistani forces.
Through interviews, archival TV footage and photographs, the film weaves in historical accounts of the genocide in Bangladesh, the misguided US foreign policy towards Pakistan at that time, and the common man’s protest against injustice.